B. Compound Illusory Belief.
A familiar example of a compound belief is the belief in a permanent or persistent individual object of a certain character. Such an idea, whatever its whole meaning may be—and this is a disputed point in philosophy—certainly seems to include a number of particular representations, corresponding to direct personal recollections, to the recollections of others, and to numerous anticipations of ourselves and of others. And if the object be a living creature endowed with feelings, our idea of it will contain, in addition to these represented perceptions of ourselves or of others, a series of represented insights, namely, such as correspond to the inner experience of the being, so far as this is known or imagined.
It would thus seem that the idea which we habitually carry about with us respecting a complex individual object is a very composite idea. In order to see this more fully, let us inquire into what is meant by our belief in a person. My idea of a particular friend contains, among other things, numbers of vague representations of his habitual modes of feeling and acting, and numbers of still more vague expectations of how he will or might feel and act in certain circumstances.
Now, it is plain that such a composite idea must have been a very slow growth, involving, in certain stages of its formation, numerous processes of inference or quasi-inference from the past to the future. But in process of time these elements fuse inseparably: the directly known and the inferred no longer stand apart in my mind; my whole conception of the individual as he has been, is, and will be, seems one indivisible cognition; and this cognition is so firmly fixed and presents itself so instantaneously to the mind when I think of the object, that it has all the appearance of an intuitive conviction.
If this is a fairly accurate description of the structure of these compound representations and of their attendant beliefs, it is easy to see how many openings for error they cover. To begin with, my representation of so complex a thing as a concrete personality must always be exceedingly inadequate and fragmentary. I see only a few facets of the person's many-sided mind and character. And yet, in general, I am not aware of this, but habitually identify my representation with the totality of the object.
More than this, a little attention to the process by which these compound beliefs arise will disclose the fact that this apparently adequate representation of another has arisen in part by other than logical processes. If the blending of memory and expectation were simply a mingling of facts with correct inferences from these, it might not greatly matter; but it is something very different from this. Not only has our direct observation of the person been very limited, even that which we have been able to see has not been perfectly mirrored in our memory. It has already been remarked that recollection is a selective process, and this truth is strikingly illustrated in the growth of our enduring representations of things. What stamps itself on my memory is what surprised me or what deeply interested me at the moment. And then there are all the risks of mnemonic illusion to be taken into account as well. Thus, my idea of a person, so far even as it is built up on a basis of direct personal recollection, is essentially a fragmentary and to some extent a misleading representation.
Nor is this all. My habitual idea of a person is a resultant of forces of memory conjoined with other forces. Among these are to be reckoned the influence of illusory perception or insight, my own and that of others. The amount of misinterpretation of the words and actions of a single human being during the course of a long acquaintance must be very considerable. To these must be added the effect of erroneous single expectations and reconstructions of past experiences, in so far as these have not been distinctly contradicted and dissipated. All these errors, connected with single acts of observing or inferring the feelings and doings of another, have their effect in distorting the subsequent total representation of the person.
Finally, we must include a more distinct ingredient of active illusion, namely, all the complex effects of the activity of imagination as led, not by fact and experience, but by feeling and desire. Our permanent idea of another reflects all that we have fondly imagined the person capable of doing, and thus is made up of an ideal as well as a real actually known personality. And this result of spontaneous imagination must be taken to include the ideals entertained by others who are likely to have influenced us by their beliefs.[142]
Enough has probably been said to show how immensely improbable it is that our permanent cognition of so complex an object as a particular human being should be at all an accurate representation of the reality, how much of the erroneous is certain to get mixed up with the true. And this being so, we may say that our apparently simple direct cognition of a given person, our assurance of what he is and will continue to be, is to some extent illusory.
Illusion of Self-Esteem.